Shafto Meredith A, Tyler Lorraine K, Dixon Marie, Taylor Jason R, Rowe James B, Cusack Rhodri, Calder Andrew J, Marslen-Wilson William D, Duncan John, Dalgleish Tim, Henson Richard N, Brayne Carol, Matthews Fiona E
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK.
BMC Neurol. 2014 Oct 14;14:204. doi: 10.1186/s12883-014-0204-1.
As greater numbers of us are living longer, it is increasingly important to understand how we can age healthily. Although old age is often stereotyped as a time of declining mental abilities and inflexibility, cognitive neuroscience reveals that older adults use neural and cognitive resources flexibly, recruiting novel neural regions and cognitive processes when necessary. Our aim in this project is to understand how age-related changes to neural structure and function interact to support cognitive abilities across the lifespan.
METHODS/DESIGN: We are recruiting a population-based cohort of 3000 adults aged 18 and over into Stage 1 of the project, where they complete an interview including health and lifestyle questions, a core cognitive assessment, and a self-completed questionnaire of lifetime experiences and physical activity. Of those interviewed, 700 participants aged 18-87 (100 per age decile) continue to Stage 2 where they undergo cognitive testing and provide measures of brain structure and function. Cognition is assessed across multiple domains including attention and executive control, language, memory, emotion, action control and learning. A subset of 280 adults return for in-depth neurocognitive assessment in Stage 3, using functional neuroimaging experiments across our key cognitive domains.Formal statistical models will be used to examine the changes that occur with healthy ageing, and to evaluate age-related reorganisation in terms of cognitive and neural functions invoked to compensate for overall age-related brain structural decline. Taken together the three stages provide deep phenotyping that will allow us to measure neural activity and flexibility during performance across a number of core cognitive functions. This approach offers hypothesis-driven insights into the relationship between brain and behaviour in healthy ageing that are relevant to the general population.
Our study is a unique resource of neuroimaging and cognitive measures relevant to change across the adult lifespan. Because we focus on normal age-related changes, our results may contribute to changing views about the ageing process, lead to targeted interventions, and reveal how normal ageing relates to frail ageing in clinicopathological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.
随着越来越多的人寿命延长，了解如何健康老龄化变得愈发重要。尽管老年常被刻板地认为是心理能力下降和缺乏灵活性的时期，但认知神经科学表明，老年人能够灵活运用神经和认知资源，必要时会调动新的神经区域和认知过程。我们这个项目的目标是了解与年龄相关的神经结构和功能变化如何相互作用，以在整个生命周期中支持认知能力。
方法/设计：我们正在招募一个基于人群的队列，其中包括3000名18岁及以上的成年人参与项目的第一阶段，他们要完成一次访谈，内容包括健康和生活方式问题、一次核心认知评估，以及一份关于一生经历和体育活动的自填问卷。在接受访谈的人中，700名年龄在18 - 87岁之间的参与者（每个年龄十分位数有100人）进入第二阶段，他们要接受认知测试并提供脑结构和功能的测量数据。认知在多个领域进行评估，包括注意力和执行控制、语言、记忆、情感、动作控制和学习。280名成年人的一个子集在第三阶段返回进行深入的神经认知评估，采用跨关键认知领域的功能性神经成像实验。将使用正式的统计模型来研究健康老龄化过程中发生的变化，并根据为补偿与年龄相关的整体脑结构衰退而调用的认知和神经功能来评估与年龄相关的重组。这三个阶段结合起来提供了深度表型分析，使我们能够测量在多种核心认知功能表现过程中的神经活动和灵活性。这种方法为健康老龄化中大脑与行为之间的关系提供了假设驱动的见解，这些见解与普通人群相关。
我们的研究是与成年期整个生命周期变化相关的神经成像和认知测量的独特资源。由于我们关注正常的与年龄相关的变化，我们的结果可能有助于改变对衰老过程的看法，导致有针对性的干预措施，并揭示正常衰老在诸如阿尔茨海默病等临床病理状况下与虚弱衰老的关系。
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